100 years ago, war declaration started The American Century | MilitaryTimes

Carpenter Guy Ford liked to watch fish play in the currents around his ship as it sailed for Europe to offload untested troops for a war as horrendous as it was defining for the century to come.

Ford would soon lose his innocence. But unlike many young Americans who crossed the Atlantic a century ago to fight in World War I, he lived to see his country go from a fledging, inward-looking nation to a world power.

Before April 6, 1917, the United States still was, in the words of American writer Walter Lippmann, a country where “money spent on battleships would be better spent on schoolhouses.”